100 Days of Happiness by Fausto Brizzi Read Free Book Online

annoying and extended cramp of my abdominal muscles (or what’s left of them). I tell Paola about it, and she insists on scheduling an abdominal sonogram, but I tell her that I’ve always had little lingering pains like this throughout my glorious athletic career, and that they always go away in time, as long as I rest up. To tell the truth, my affair with Signora Moroni isn’t really something I could describe as resting up, but the pain is still tolerable even during sex. I often think back on the abdominal sonogram I never got as a scene from the movie
Sliding Doors
.
    What would have happened if I’d taken Paola’s advice?
    Would I have lived for another ten, or twenty, or thirty years?
    Or would I have been hit by a bus at the hospital entrance and killed instantly?
    My personal sliding door slid shut right in front of me that day.
    I just didn’t know it at the time.
    Â * * * 
    Little by little I talk myself into believing that it’s not a muscular problem but rather an insidious and minuscule hernia. A simple operation would take care of everything, but I still decide to go on waiting, hoping against hope that one morning I’ll wake up just healthy. In the meanwhile, the symptoms just go on proliferating: I start to feel more tired than usual; one afternoon I throw up; and anothertime I go for weeks with an annoying low-grade fever. And each time I manage to find a logical explanation: “I’m just under a lot of stress lately”; “I shouldn’t have eaten what I ate last night”; “I must have gotten a chill in the pool yesterday, and 98.9 isn’t really a fever at all.” I still don’t connect the warning signs to that single lethal enemy.
    The months fly past and in the meanwhile, as you know, my family life collapses and I wind up sleeping in the back room of the pastry shop. One rainy night in early March, I try to do my part and help Oscar as he places a large tray of chocolate muffins in the oven, but without warning, a stronger jab of pain than usual makes me double over. I drop the tray to the floor and let out a shout. Oscar and his Sinhalese assistant both prop me up, confused, and help me to a chair. I tell them that these pains have been bothering me for eight months now, recurring frequently, and that I’ve been doing my best to coexist with this damned hernia. For too long.
    â€œGo have a specialist take a look at you,” Oscar suggests.
    â€œThanks, Oscar, but you’ll see; I’ll be all better in a couple of weeks.”
    â€œThat wasn’t a suggestion,” my father-in-law explains. “It was an order: go have a specialist take a look at you. It might even be an ulcer. A customer of mine died of an ulcer—it’s no laughing matter. One day he was sitting here eating a sweet roll with whipped cream and talking about A. S. Roma’s latest win, the next day he was in the cemetery, six feet under.”
    Direct strike, ship sunk. Oscar managed to be both clear and direct, as always. The word “died” is a cold shower, and it finally persuades me to see a doctor, certain by now that it’s actually an ulcer. So I go and see Umberto. A veterinarian is, after all, a doctor of sorts.
    Umberto’s waiting room is full.
    Around me are sitting a little old cat lady, on her lap a carry crate containing a Persian; a thirteen-year-old boy with his mother and a chameleon; an austere man in his fifties with an obnoxious collie whoresembles him to a T; and a pretty young tattooed woman in her early thirties with a mysterious basket on the seat next to her.
    The cat lady stares at me curiously, then gives in to her overwhelming curiosity: “What kind of animal do you have?”
    â€œI have ticks,” I reply with a sunny smile.
    She can’t tell whether I’m joking or I mean it. In any case, she moves a seat away from me.
    I’m the last one ushered into the doctor’s